In an
earlier post, I blogged briefly about two
local events, fascinating enough to
anyone who experienced them directly, but ultimately no more than Facebook
fodder, soon gone from the mind, like the wind.
One of these, however, continues to develop, and to prompt
reflections of a larger compass than Gee-whiz lookit this shiny coin.
We begin partway through the earlier post, then elaborate.
~
[Later update] The story is getting weirder, so I’d
better elaborate. This, from an
e-mail sent to friends:
Early this evening, S. and I walked to
the library, via the dockside on Lake *****. There
were half a dozen people standing around, and a couple of policemen.
Someone pointed to what they thought looked like a human corpse floating not
far from the dock. I peered to make it out; it looked like
Hollywood’s idea of a zombie.
Now, today at work, a friend had given
me a nice Halloween drawing, so the first thing that occurred to me was that it
was a Halloween prank. A couple standing beside us concurred.
Twenty minutes later, as we returned
from the library, we saw: half a dozen patrol cars; two or three fire engines;
a large inflatable boat labeled “marine rescue”; an ambulence or two; and
various other vehicles with flashing or whirling lights. Some firemen
were trudging back from the scene, one of them holding a long gaff. “Uhh…
looks like it wasn’t a Halloween prank”, I said. The fireman would
neither confirm nor deny, saying only “The police are handling it.”
The dock was now surrounded by yellow
tape. No attempt had been made to fish the body out, though an officer in
a yellow rubber wading-suit was maneuvering waist-deep next to the body.
From a new angle, and now taking the whole thing more seriously, I could see
that it was indeed human, or had been; its hands stuck up from the water,
rigid as claws.
 |
| This is pretty much what it
looked like, only on its back. |
[Update 10/10/13] I shared this incident with some
friends and coworkers, current or former residents of this town, and however
slight it be in the larger scheme of things, it piqued their interest. One of them today asked whether the
“Flyer”, the local giveaway rag, had reported on the story (which is indeed a
big one for our sleepy hamlet).
And so I dragged today’s issue from our sopping front lawn, dried it,
and perused.
My heart gave a start, confronted
with a large color photograph of the dockside area of that very lake! Only -- no mention of the body. Instead, a story about the little
three-foot-by-three-foot artificial boxed islands, planted with tall grass, which
have been dubbed “floating wetlands”.
Cute, but actually a silly designation, since the point of wetlands is
to absorb excess water, whereas this particular lakelet, itself brought into
being only by the labors of engineers, suffers rather from chronic aqueous
insufficiency.
[Update, a couple of days
later] Finally, the briefest of
mentions has appeared on the Web.
The deceased was in his thirties, of no known address. But -- get this -- the police are
saying, “No signs of foul play.”
Corpse appears in broad daylight
in six inches of water, looking like a mummy that has been dead ten thousand
years. No-one knows how it got
there. Hands turned into zombie
claws. “No signs of foul play.”
Right.
[Update, evening of 20 October
2013] No -- Wait -- this is too
weird.
My wife was driving home from the
computer lab this evening, on **** **** Parkway, which runs by that very lake,
and noticed two squad cars.
Between them, on the roadway … a large, compact pile of (possibly human
intestines). But otherwise no
body. “They looked fresh,”
she said.
[Update 22 October 2013] And again, no reflection of this in any
news source that I can discern.
My wife commented: If we just chanced upon these incidents, within a few days and within walking
distance of each other, and they go unreported -- how much else might be going
on that we don’t know about?
Both these bizarre incidents look
less like accidents, or any sort of crime that makes straightforward sense --
more like warnings, like the horse’s head in the bed.
More generally, the situation
suggests the layers of oddity beneath the surface of things.
A historian remarked, anent the “
Umbrella Man”,
that as you brought up
the focus on the lens of history, new and inexplicable features begin to
appear:
much as, beneath the
solidity of macroscopic objects, lies the tracery of molecules and atoms;
and beneath these, obeying different
laws, the quarks and other elementary particles.
~
So, possibly a couple of
crime-scenes, though not reported as such, and evidently destined to be
forgotten with the facts forever undiscovered. Might there be anything there, if someone were to dig?
There might; but eventually you also might find that
(as philosophers say) “your spade is turned”. For, consider a vastly more high-profile case,
which has received intensive
attention from professionals and from the commentariat, turned every whichway,
examined from every angle, for several years: the murder of one Meredith
Kercher, in Perugia, Italia, in 2007.
In the international panoply of
crime, the incident was of scant inherent moment. A total unknown with a lot of louche friends winds up dead,
no political angle, nothing there, really. What launched the case to international attention, and
kept it there, was that one of the
accused (the only one people cared about) was a Foxy Young Female -- de rigueur
for the fickle public to give a darn about anything -- cast ambiguously in the
role of villain or victim (and
certainly vixen): Amanda Knox.
We touched briefly on this case in
a note focused not on the crime but on its massage in the media.
And now this week’s issue of the
London
Review of Books has a retrospective on the case.
The LRB’s coverage is immeasurably better than the fawning
glurge from the
New York Times Book Review which prompted our original
rant.
(People who read, or riffle through, the NYTBRev, probably
imagine that they are holding something pretty highbrow in their hands. They are not.) A vast range of evidence has been
adduced and argued-over, from something as sophisticated as Luminol, or as
absurd as a turd. (Memo to murderers:
Don’t forget to flush!)
I’ll spare you the details of the
new account. The takeaway is that,
after all these years, and all the forensics and analytics, we still don’t
really know who, how, or why.
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere
causas …
It has well been said, that the
unexamined life is not worth living.
But even
examined
life may
not yield to our
understanding.
~
Hamster Break
 |
|
This hamster is not a suspect in any of these cases. At least, according to its lawyer
|
~
Probably these local anomalies
will fade with as little left behind them as a day of unsettled weather. Yet possibly, years later, after
the smoke from the Zombie Apocalypse has cleared, historians will gasp: My God. So that hamlet was the new Sunnydale -- the location of the
Hellmouth.
~
[Update 25 October 2013] On the matter of Can we ever really know anything about
what happens -- From this coming Sunday’s NYTimes Book Review:
Kennedy, the Elusive President
With roughly
40,000 books about John F. Kennedy published to date, and hundreds planned on
the 50th anniversary of his assassination next month, why is it we still know
so little about the man and the president?
